Patients’ experience of their GP practice in the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients’ experiences of general practice in England using multicategory response data from the 2020 and 2021 GP Patient Surveys, where the former was conducted in the run up to the first UK national lockdown at the end of March 2020 and the latter a year later. It offers a novel analysis of changes in patients’ experience that provides measures of practice quality change which are sensitive to changes in the distribution of patients across the full set of response categories not just in the proportion meeting some binary quality threshold. We find a 5.8 percentage point difference between the proportions of patients whose experience got better rather than worse between the two years, whereas the proportion of patients describing their experience as ‘good’ only increased by 1.2 percentage points. Patients in 2021 were likely to rate their GP more highly if their last appointment was conducted face-to-face at their own practice rather than over the phone or online, suggesting that the improvement in patients’ rating of GP services was not the result of the prescribed move towards the greater use of remote consultations. Practice-level changes exhibit reversion towards the GP service quality of England as a whole, likely reflecting some combination of sampling variability and transitory shocks to patient experience at both patient and practice levels.